Recently, I took my car into the repair shop. The car was running fine as far as I could tell, so the only reason for the visit was because the check engine light had appeared on my dashboard. Part of me assumed the car was fine. The car was running…

I love baseball. I grew up watching games on tv and I played it for 9 years. Once or twice a year, I got to see games live in the meccas of Wrigley Field or Old Comiskey (and later the mis-step that was New Comiskey). …

In 1997, the game of chess as we know it changed. For the first time, a computer program defeated a human chess grandmaster when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov 3 1/2–2 1/2 in a 6 game chess series. Having achieved what was once thought impossible, IBM packed up Deep…

In nature, evolution is generally a slow process. Natural selection works over many generations, where beneficial traits gradually prove out over time until a new species has emerged from what it once had been. Evolution has no starting point and is constantly unfolding. Changes happen bit by bit, building on…

How to take better advantage of your most valuable resource: users — A key hallmark of user experience design is talking with users and aligning with their goals and needs. Most of the focus, however, is in two key phases: conversations up front to discover product needs (discovery and generative research) and another round once a concept has been laid out (usability…

If you’re only supporting the most obvious user goals, you’re missing something — In the first project at my first job, I was brought in to contribute to the redesign of a command and control center for the military (I won’t get into specifics about which one or for what; that’s largely irrelevant here). To start the project, the team did a lot…

For job seekers, your resume is the first impression you make on the people you hope to work with. For many fields, the content of the resume is the key factor in standing out from the crowd. …

It’s pretty clear that the way most technology teams are run is broken. Too often, designers and developers, while nominally on the same team, operate in mini silos. There may be some interactions between the two, but for the most part, designers execute the research and create the product concept…

Perhaps the greatest disservice that ever befell the UX industry (or Interaction Design or Human Factors or whatever label you prefer) was when the term human-computer interaction was coined. The phrase comes with good intentions. Born in the 1980s, considering how a person interacted with a tool was a fairly…